Elites

Concentrated in the provincial, departmental, and national capitals,
Peru's upper class was the other side of the coin of peonage. Whereas
the Quechua or Aymara native population was powerless, submissive, and
poor, the regional and national elites were Hispanic, dominant, and
wealthy. The inheritors of colonial power quickly reaffirmed their
political, social, and economic hegemony over the nation even though the
Peruvian state itself was a most unstable entity until the presidency of
Ramón Castilla. They continued to strike the posture of conquerors
toward the native peoples, justifying themselves as civilized, culto
(cultured), and urbane, as well as gente decente (decent
people), in the customary phrase of the provincial town. Such
presumption of status is a powerful but unwritten code of entitlement.
It permits one to expect to have obedient servants, to be deferred to by
those of lesser station, and to be the first to enjoy opportunity,
services of the state, and whatever resources might be available.

The modern national upper classes of Peru are today a more diverse
population than was the case even at the end of the nineteenth century.
They have remained essentially identified with the Costa, even though
they have controlled extensive property in the highlands and Selva.
Nevertheless, these elites are highly conscious of class integrity as
social life unfolds in the context of private clubs and specialized
economic circles. The predilection of the upper-class families to show
the strength of their lineages is revealed not only in the use of full
names, which always contain both one's father's and mother's last names
in that order, but also the apellidos (last names) of important
grandparental generations. Thus, magazine society pages report names
like José Carlos Prado Fernandini Beltrán de Espantoso y Ugarteche, in
which only Prado is the last name in the American sense. Use of the
family pedigree to demonstrate rank is common among the elite when the
names are clearly associated with wealth and power.

As Peruvians have become more cosmopolitan, foreign names from
Britain, Italy, Austria, and Germany have appeared with increasing
frequency among those claiming upper-class credentials, leading to the
conclusion that it is easier to reach elite status from outside Peru
than to ascend from within the society. There are, of course a number of
families who can trace their lineages to the colonial period. However,
families of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants
constitute about 40 percent of Peru's most elite sector, indicating a
surprising openness to cosmopolitan mobility. In a 1980s list of Peru's
national elite containing over 250 family names, for example, only one
of clearly Quechua origins could be identified.

The racial composition of the upper class is predominantly white,
although a few mestizos are represented, especially at regional levels.
The social structure of the country follows a Lima-based model. The
national upper class is located almost exclusively in the province of
Lima, the second strata of elites is provincial, residing in the old
principal regional cities, such as Arequipa, Trujillo, and Cusco, but
not in Huancayo, Chimbote, or Juliaca, whose populations are
predominantly of highland mestizo and cholo origins.
Upper-class status in provincial life generally does not equate with the
same levels in Lima, but rather to a middle level in the national social
hierarchy.

Traditionally, the upper classes based their power and wealth on
rural land ownership and secondarily on urban industrial forms of
investment. This situation has changed in part through the rise of
business, industry, banking, and political opportunities, and also
because of the Agrarian Reform Law of 1969, which forced dramatic
changes in land tenure patterns. It was, however, a change as difficult
to make as any that could be imagined: the fabled landed oligarchy
greatly feared any alterations in its property rights, which included
the colonos and yanaconas attached to both highland
and coastal estates. Their control over Peru's power, purse, and
peasantry bordered on the absolute until the second half of the
twentieth century, when the great highland migrations took hold of
coastal cities and industrial growth exploded. Ensuing social and
political demands could no longer be managed from behind the traditional
scenes of power.

Vested interests of the landed upper class were ensconced in the
National Agrarian Association (Sociedad Nacional Agraria-- SNA). Until
the first government of Fernando Belaúnde, it had been impossible to
discover just what the property and investment interests of this group
were because government files on these subjects were closed and, indeed,
had never been publicly scrutinized. All of this changed abruptly after
the peasant land invasions of estates in 1963, when the need for
solutions overcame the secrecy. In 1966 economic historian Carlos
Malpica Silva Santisteban identified the landed oligarchy as a
relatively small group, with 190 families owning 54 percent of the
irrigated coast and 36 families or persons holding 63 percent of titled
land in the Selva, for a total of over 3 million hectares. In the
highlands, the data were similar in content but hard to verify.

Although upper-class wealth was founded on rural properties, it is
evident that elite urban, mining, and industrial interests were also
extensive. An indefatigable compiler of data on Peru's elites, Malpica
annotated an extensive catalog of modern business and banking concerns
showing the concentration of economic control in the hands of a tiny
group of elite families, many being familiar traditional members of the
oligarchy, now deprived of their land base by the agrarian reform. Of
the seventy-nine families holding significant blocks of shares in the
twelve principal insurance and banking operations in 1989, almost 50
percent were descended from the aforementioned European immigrant
groups. Despite this Eurocentric trend, descendants of Japanese and
Chinese immigrants have also entered the economic elites, if not with
the equivalent social status. At least one Chinese-Peruvian family,
which holds substantial banking, commercial, and industrial investments,
descends from immigrants who arrived as indentured laborers in the
nineteenth century.